The present invention relates to a semiconductor device, a monitoring system, and a lifetime prediction method.
Recently, ISO 26262 has received attention as Functional Safety standards for in-vehicle electronic equipment or the like. Functional Safety means that, even in case a fault has occurred in a microcomputer (e.g., MCU: Micro Control Unit) which is a component of an in-vehicle equipment, a minimum allowable safety level is assured by taking functional measures. For instance, it is required to detect a fault, if having occurred, and perform a control action to make the transition to another operation (for example, stopping a vehicle safely).
One example of functional means is a lock-step scheme using a plurality of processor cores. In association with this technique, Patent Document 1 describes a microcontroller equipped with two data processing units having the same functionality. The microcomputer pertaining to Patent Document 1 includes a first data processing unit, a second data processing unit that performs the same data processing as the first data processing unit does, and a comparator. The comparator compares an output from the first data processing unit and an output from the second data processing unit. In the event of a compared result mismatch, it is decided that a fault having occurred in the first data processing unit has been detected, exception handling, e.g., stopping the microcomputer is performed.